Food for Thought: Dinner with Rachel Urquart

“Transfixing” is how The New York Times described The Visionist, Rachel Urquhart’s mesmerizing novel about a teenage girl who takes refuge in a Shaker community in western Massachusetts. It’s “a thrilling exploration of good and evil, friendship, family, and faith in 19th-century Massachusetts,” according to The Guardian, and based on extensive research conducted at Hancock Shaker Village. With a feminist subtext, the book is also a meditation on the value of hardship and the transformative nature of ecstasy according to The New York Times. Urquhart, who contributes to the New Yorker, Vogue, and Spy, among many others, will talk about the rapturous side of the Shakers, and her book that has been called “shatteringly original” (San Francisco Chronicle), “exquisite” (NPR) and “full of energy and excitement and feeling” (New York Review of Books).